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The opening titles are slime-green on grainy monochrome, footage from a bank surveillance camera blasted by an unassuming figure who smilingly draws a shotgun. The perpetrator goes down but not before smashing through barricades and absorbing countless bullets, at the hospital he reveals himself to be an extraterrestrial slug looking for the next host, the moribund patient on a neighboring bed fits the bill. Perplexed by these violent irruptions, the LAPD detective (Michael Nouri) reluctantly pairs up with an FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) who's peculiarly attuned to the ways of the fugitive. "A little bizarre," admittedly, this search for a joyriding alien with a yen for red Ferraris and blaring rock and junk food. "I guess a career in the police didn't really prepare you for this, did it?" A gratifying adjustment of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the hyper-consumerist Eighties, making Jack Sholder's inspired buddy-cop mutation the middle part in a trilogy bracketed by Cohen's The Stuff and Carpenter's They Live. Materialistic appetites govern the visitor ("He sees something he wants, he steals it. Something gets in his way, he kills it"), who takes a break from the chase to inspect the protuberant form of his latest incarnation, a sullen stripper (Claudia Christian). The vigorous approach to action is mated with an oddball serenity marvelously embodied by MacLachlan—blankly biting into an Alka-Seltzer tablet or delicately wielding Chekhov's flamethrower, he hones his witty sang-froid in a rehearsal for Twin Peaks. (Surely Lynch appreciated the character's mien, as well as his byword: "Explanation won't help you.") Among the surrealistic aperçus is the short distance between pooch and politico, with a climax founded on Cronenberg's The Dead Zone and a denouement touched by Lang's Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse. With Clu Gulager, Clarence Felder, Ed O'Ross, William Boyett, Richard Brooks, Katherine Cannon, Larry Cedar, Chris Mulkey, John McCann, Lin Shaye, and Danny Trejo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |